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There's a minimum level of complexity and creativity which constitutes a copyright violation. It's up to a legal professional to draw the line, but I believe it

There's a minimum level of complexity and creativity which constitutes a copyright violation. It's up to a legal professional to draw the line, but I believe it can be a single line of code (`i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 );`) If I saw 100 LOC which was very similar to something which I wrote, AND contained a log statement copied verbatim, it's very easy to imply that the entire piece of code is a derivative work. Let's say I write FizzBuzz: // Copyright (c) 2022 David Allison. All rights reserved. for num in range(100): if num % 3 == 0 and num % 5 == 0: print("DA: fizzbuzz") elif num % 3 == 0: print("DA: fizz") elif num % 5 == 0: print("DA: buzz") else: print(num) If I found the modified FizzBuzz algorithm in the wild with one line containing the "DA" prefix, it may have been learned from a fraction of a fraction of my code but it still contains my 'unique' creativity, is that a copyright violation? Aside: Due to some uniquely named code I've contributed to, I strongly suspect that Copilot would output my GitHub username. I don't really want to open Pandora's box here, but I'd be curious.

visarga 4y ago
Replicating copyrighted code from the training set only happens 1% of the time, it's the exception not the rule. And when it happens it's usually because the same text appears multiple times in the training set. So it will memorize boilerplate and popular code snippets, not unique stuff. Even a replicated piece of code 100 lines long is no big deal in my opinion, unless it contains some kind of unique thing never seen before, like an optimized matrix multiplication function. Certainly not FizzBuzz. On the practical side, it is actually easy to filter out sequences of words that are too similar to the training set from the output of the model. You just generate another snippet until it is "original" enough.
- david_allison 4y ago
  I have ~400KLOC changed on GitHub. 1% of the time happens multiple times a day given scale. Pragmatically, people are already knowingly committing commercially viable copyright violations of my work. I'd rather it wasn't encouraged further by a US-based 'big tech', especially if the people using my code aren't aware that they're doing anything questionable. Some months, I earn over 100x less from OSS than I would in industry. I don't want people taking advantage any more than I'm comfortable with, especially for commercial purposes.
  - visarga 4y ago
    It's the wild west phase, after it settles down there will probably be ways to signal you don't want to allow training on your code. But I think it's just like taking your grain of sand from the beach so nobody else can have it. The beach is going to be just the same.
    - ISL 4y ago
      As part of the wild-west phase, it is possible that the inclusion of a single identifiable AGPL project in the training set leads to the licensing of Copilot as AGPL. Such an outcome might lead hastily to the future you imagine.

visarga 4y ago

Replicating copyrighted code from the training set only happens 1% of the time, it's the exception not the rule. And when it happens it's usually because the same text appears multiple times in the training set. So it will memorize boilerplate and popular code snippets, not unique stuff. Even a replicated piece of code 100 lines long is no big deal in my opinion, unless it contains some kind of unique thing never seen before, like an optimized matrix multiplication function. Certainly not FizzBuzz. On the practical side, it is actually easy to filter out sequences of words that are too similar to the training set from the output of the model. You just generate another snippet until it is "original" enough.

david_allison 4y ago
I have ~400KLOC changed on GitHub. 1% of the time happens multiple times a day given scale. Pragmatically, people are already knowingly committing commercially viable copyright violations of my work. I'd rather it wasn't encouraged further by a US-based 'big tech', especially if the people using my code aren't aware that they're doing anything questionable. Some months, I earn over 100x less from OSS than I would in industry. I don't want people taking advantage any more than I'm comfortable with, especially for commercial purposes.
- visarga 4y ago
  It's the wild west phase, after it settles down there will probably be ways to signal you don't want to allow training on your code. But I think it's just like taking your grain of sand from the beach so nobody else can have it. The beach is going to be just the same.
  - ISL 4y ago
    As part of the wild-west phase, it is possible that the inclusion of a single identifiable AGPL project in the training set leads to the licensing of Copilot as AGPL. Such an outcome might lead hastily to the future you imagine.